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Sunday, September 8, 2013

Welcome to the Second Incarnation of Empires Must Fall

The original incarnation of this weblog began in 2009, and Xanga hosted it. I have a friend there who had his own 'blog (addressing topics related to one of my hobbies, so why not use the account I made to comment on his 'blog for something more than that? That ended in the last week or so, when Xanga--in a move meant to stave off becoming the next MySpace--migrated its servers and took all of the 'blogs there with them. Those who paid Xanga in advance were all allowed to revive their 'blogs right away; I had little warning, and no spare currency, so I wasn't one of those who paid. Rather than wait around for something to happen on a schedule that I can't control (or even influence), or attempt to deal with XML files (as that is beyond my expertise), I decided to move Empires to the same place where I have other 'blogs about other topics. As of this post, and for the foreseeable future, Empire's previous incarnation is lost and with it the years of posts made there.

What I write about here is a combination of philosophy, history and political science with some breaks taken for current events that deal with the topic at hand: the idea of Empire, why it is--and has always been--a bad thing, and why we should seek to destroy it. While I formerly kept to a strict posting schedule of Sunday updates, now that I have an opportunity to reconsider that policy; I think now that it would be better to stay open to a more frequent posting schedule, using the Sunday updates as anchors to build around.

Now, a definition:

EMPIRE (noun): An idea whose very existence is toxic to those who host it, as it is a parasite akin to the vampire of legend. It feeds off of its host, inducing their enthrallment by imbuing it with some measure of fleeting (and often illusory) power in the manner of a narcotics addict, and then compelling those it enthralls to destroy themselves and all around them to procure whatever it wants in exchange for most of that false power. In time, it abandons the consumed host in favor of a new victim and repeats the cycle anew. Symptoms include rigid hierarchical institutions and cultures, adherence to dogma and doctrine that dehumanize some or all of Mankind (often to convince the thralls to then do other things to them that abhorrent otherwise), a propensity for delusional thought, cult-like behavioral patterns, an increasing alienation from nature and the inherent order of the natural world and an obsession with domination over others (including the fear of being dominated by others) with no consideration for a world without domination at all.

I will often liken Empire and its thralls to drug addicts-turned-dealers, vampires (and similar monsters) and such because these are easy-to-grasp icons that competently illustrate the larger idea of Empire to many people reading this 'blog. However, that is not the big mind-blowing concept; the big one is that there is now, and has always been, just one Empire. The apparent fall of one empire and the rise of another is an illusion; what actually happens is that Empire shifts hosts, and in later centuries maintains connections across would-be hosts to better facilitate host-shifting when it finds necessary that it do so. This is why I explain Empire as an idea, a toxic meme, that is sufficiently self-aware to act like the things we are more familiar with: parasites.

Right now, what we see is that Empire has dispensed with the concept of using individual states (or nation-states, for that matter) as a specific host; instead, we see Empire using multiple hosts as a distributed gestalt entity so that damage to one part of its manifest being doesn't fatally compromise its operations. The United Kingdom handles the financial aspect, the United States is its face and force, with France and Germany switching off as the main intellectual whores who play Good Cop to the UK/US's Bad Cop (but nonetheless benefit from, and participate in, this incarnation). Meanwhile it maintains backups links in Russia as well as the People's Republic of China should resistance to the current Anglo-American gestalt-host become too much to overcome.

Stick around. Subscribe, follow and engage- and maybe you'll get to witness more of my journey to do the impossible: to kill an idea.